Terra Incognita

A Novel of the Roman Empire

By Ruth Downie

In this highly anticipated sequel to Ruth Downie's New York Times bestselling debut, beloved army doctor Gaius Petrius Ruso strikes out for the uncivilized borders of Roman Britain, where he runs into murder and the ghosts of his vexingly beautiful slave Tilla's past.

It is spring in the year 118, and Hadrian has been emperor of Rome for less than a year. After his long and reluctant investigation of the murders of a handful of local prostitutes, Gaius Petreius Ruso needs to get out of town. With that in mind, he has volunteered for a posting with the army in the far reaches of Britannia-a calmer place for a tired man.
But the edge of the Roman Empire is a volatile place; the independent tribes of the North dwell near its borders. These hinterlands are the homeland of Ruso's slave, Tilla, who has scores of her own to settle there: Her tribespeople, under the leadership of the mysterious Stag Man, are fomenting a rebellion against Roman control; and her former lover is implicated in the grisly murder of a soldier. Ruso, once again unwillingly pulled into the murder investigation, is appalled to find that Tilla is still spending time with the prime suspect. Worse, he is honor-bound to try to prove the man innocent-and the army wrong-by finding another culprit.
Soon both Ruso's and Tilla's lives are in jeopardy, as is the future of their burgeoning romance. Terra Incognita shines light on a remote corner of the ancient world, where Ruso's luck is running short-again.

Visit Ruth's blog.

In 2004, Ruth Downie won the Fay Weldon section of BBC3’s End of Story competition. Other books in this trilogy include Medicus, this, Terra Incognita, and the forthcoming Persona Non Grata.

More about the author (taken from her blog):

I was born in Ilfracombe, in beautiful North Devon. Some people know from a very early age that they are going to be writers: I wasn’t one of them. I fear this will upset some readers, but I left university with an English degree and no greater ambition than to get married and live happily ever after. Perhaps it was all that Jane Austen.

Even in those days, being a wife was not actually a full-time career. Some of my earliest ventures into creative writing were attempts to type up my indecipherable shorthand in such a way that the boss wouldn’t suspect that he hadn’t really said it. As secretaries were replaced with computers, and my higher-flying contemporaries discovered to their horror that they were expected to type their own letters, there were fewer and fewer outlets for creativity in the office. Finally I took the plunge and started writing my own stuff.

At this point I was lucky enough to be working for a company that needed scripts written, and they were brave enough to give the office staff a shot at doing it. (They once needed kitchen appliances scavenged from the local tip to use on a film shoot, and kindly gave us the chance to do that, too.) Thanks, Pace Productions!

I am currently proud to be living in Milton Keynes. (Milton Keynes, for non-UK readers, was created as a new town in the 1970’s and only the ignorant make jokes about it). I have a husband, two grown-up sons, a cat, and a garden with potential. My time is divided between writing the Ruso novels, thinking I should be writing the Ruso novels, and the occasional week spent grovelling in mud with an archaeological trowel.